Quote of the Day: shades of memory
Jean-Pierre Melville: ‘The war period was awful, horrible and … marvellous!’
Rui Nogueira: ‘So the quotation from Georges Courteline with which L’ARMEE DES OMBRES opens is a reflection of your own feelings — “Unhappy memories! Yet be welcome, for you are my distant youth.”‘
Jean-Pierre Melville: ‘Precisely. I love that phase and I think it’s extraordinarily true. I suffered a lot during the first months of my military service, and I thought it hardly possible that a man as witty, intelligent and sensitive as Courteline could have written Les Gaîtes de L’Escadron, whereas of course he too had been very unhappy during his service. The one day, thinking over my past, I suddenly understood the charm that “unhappy memories” can have. As I grow older, I look back with nostalgia on the years from 1940 to 1944, because they are part of my youth.’
~ from Melville, by Rui Nogueira.
No profound observations from me. But I love L’ARMEE DES OMBRES (translators please note : it’s The Army of the Shadows, not The Army in the Shadows) dearly, and would recommend it as an excellent place either to get started on an appreciation of Melville, or as an alternative point of contact if you’ve seen one of his crime thrillers and been left cold by it. I like the thrillers a lot, but this is something else.
April 4, 2008 at 4:49 pm
It’s very definitely something else, and its elevation to classic status nearly 40 years after it was made is one of the more surprising developments in film cuture. Melville’s sleek crime films (where you can barely tell the difference between the cops and the robbers) and most enoyable. L’Armee des Obres is Melville playing for keeps. It’s a decidedly disconcerting experience.
April 4, 2008 at 5:23 pm
The movie seems to have suffered in France from criticism based on politics. Melville was right-wing but unaligned to any political group. I don’t know enough about the resistance to know if the attacks were in some way justified, ideologically, but greater historical distance seems to have allowed people to perceive the film as he intended it — a very real and concrete recreation of a real period and events, that somehow still ends up being abstract, like all his films.
The longer I live, the more I feel the really exciting stuff in cinema is the head-on clash between reality and the fantastic, or realism and stylisation.
April 4, 2008 at 5:49 pm
The film was released in 1969, and was therefore subject to jibes when DeGaulle is represented in it as a shadow on a wall. Melville was decidedly “Conservative.” But then so is Rohmer, who the newly Maoist Cahiers treated like a totemic elder.
Melville reminds me of Nabokov in many ways.
April 4, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Now you have me imagining a Melville version of Lolita with Alain Delon as Humbert… A fine fever-dream double feature with Plein Soleil, that would make.
April 4, 2008 at 5:58 pm
In that case Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet should play Lolita.
And I’ll play Quilty!
April 4, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Can you dance like Peter Sellers? (Translation: can you stand perfectly still?)
April 4, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Yes I can, Captain!
April 4, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Too bad Melville’s not here to make it. Actually, an all-male Lolita would be quite an interesting — and quite a controversial — proposition.
April 4, 2008 at 11:42 pm
I’ll have my friend Dennis Cooper whip up a script!
April 5, 2008 at 9:19 am
Crikey — he would be the man for the job. I’m not sure who would be the ideal director — or where it could get shown!
April 5, 2008 at 11:31 am
>Actually, an all-male Lolita would be quite an interesting — and quite a controversial — proposition.
No copping out either, I wanna see penetration.
April 5, 2008 at 11:35 am
CGI! Actually, that would still be illegal. Which does seem kind of ridiculous.
“When you’re talking about something that can be reduced to kots of little ones and zeroes, that’s at worst morally neutral.” ~ Moby.
Discuss.
April 5, 2008 at 8:38 pm
The ideal director? Patrice Chereau bien sur !
April 5, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Very likely!